[Distutils] Are egg files needed when building/installing via --root?

[Brian Cameron]

Phillip:

Thank you and Nathan for the answers.  That is very helpful information
to me.  I have been reading further and took a look at the
documentation, and notice egg files and metadata are described here:

http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools#adding-new-egg-info-files
http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools#defining-additional-metadata

However, I didn't find any references to the situation I am describing,
about how these files are useful to install even when not shipping the
module as eggs.  If such documentation exists, I am sure that would help
me further understand how this works.  Or might the documentation
benefit from discussing this a bit more?  The documentation does not 
provide any real examples of what constitutes metadata, or why being
able to store metadata is generally useful.

Thanks again,

Brian


> At 11:21 AM 11/27/2008 -0600, Brian Cameron wrote:
>> Is there any value in shipping these files when not delivering as 
>> Eggs, or
>> could they safely be just removed?
> 
> They cannot safely be removed, for several reasons, including:
> 
> 1. They identify the installed package so that:
> a) code which looks for dependencies at runtime will be satisfied, and
> b) easy_install won't install a duplicate of the same package when 
> trying to satisfy a dependency
> 
> 2. Packages which provide or use entry points will not function 
> correctly without them
> 
> 3. Packages which include other metadata or project-specific data (such 
> as localizations, translations, etc.) for runtime use will not work 
> correctly either.
> 
> Thus, neither setuptools nor the distutils provide the option of not 
> including .egg-info.
>